“I have had rougher elevator rides.”

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LUCKY WILSON IS ON a first-name basis with most of the wildlife in Resurrection Bay, from George and Martha, two eagles who have been nesting in a scrag across from Lucky’s helicopter pad at the Seward Airport for twenty years, to Michael, an old goat of the four-legged kind who has chosen a tiny green square of nearly vertical pasture between two snow fields on the fiercely steep slope of a mountain in which to live out his declining years. “We’re about a thousand feet away from him,” Lucky says. “You get any closer you’ll scare them, and if you scare them you’ll change their habits, and that’s bad.” He points out a hole a grizzly bear has dug in the side of a mountain. “He was after a parka squirrel,” Lucky says. “I could walk into that hole standing upright.”

We are presently hovering at two thousand feet above sea level, Lucky in the right seat of a Eurocopter AS350 helicopter, on our way to the top of Godwin Glacier, and it’s one of those gorgeous Resurrection Bay days when, as Lucky says, pointing south, “Look. Look right there. See it? That’s Hawaii.”